Michael Lewis wrote a best selling book on baseball analytics called Moneyball. It was the story of how the Oakland Athletics with their executive Billy Beane managed to use data on players to improve their team. The book became a movie starring Brad Pitt as Billy Beane. However, Michael Lewis discovered that data analysis had another dimension. What was the decision making process people used to analyze the data once they had it. And, why did they so often make the Wrong Decision? Lewis tells an extraordinary story of the two men whose ideas changed the world. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky met in war-torn 1960s Israel. Both were gifted young psychology professors. Kahneman was a rootless son of holocaust survivors who saw the world as a problem to be solved. Tversky was a voluble, instinctual with incredible mathematical abilities. Together over the years they forged a relationship that became a shared mind. These two men created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionizing everything from Big Data to medicine, from how we are governed to how we spend, from high finance to football. If you want to make better decisions, The Undoing Project will help you with that. GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction: The Problem That Never Goes Away 15
1 Man Boobs 21
2 The Outsider 52
3 The Insider 85
4 Errors 116
5 The Collision 142
6 The Mind’s Rules 165
7 The Rules Of Prediction 196
8 Going Viral 212
9 Birth Of The Warrior Psychologist 238
10 The Isolation Effect 268
11 The Rules Of Undoing 291
12 This Cloud Of Possibility 313
Coda: Bora-Bora 339
A Note on Sources 353
Acknowledgments 361
Pass! I’m too old for this stuff!
Bob, old dogs do learn New Tricks!
And I have never heard of either man. Shame on me.
Patti, Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for his work on decision-making. Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow was a best-selling book published in 2011. You can read my review here: http://georgekelley.org/thinking-fast-slow-by-daniel-kahneman/
I like Lewis’s books, Moneyball and The Blind Side in particular, but I’m not sure this one interests me enough to read it.
Jeff, if you liked MONEYBALL you’ll like THE UNDOING PROJECT. It’s basically a sequel that fills in a lot of gaps.
A chapter on Man Boobs??? sorry your review didn’t address that chapter in depth!
Maggie, I was wondering if someone would catch that Chapter title! This story goes like this: before the 2007 NBA draft, the Houston Rockets were considering drafting a European player, Marc Gasol. But the scouts made fun of Gasol because he had “man boobs.” As a result, Houston made the Bad Decision to pass on drafting Gasol. The Memphis Grizzlies took Gasol with the 48th pick in the NBA draft. Gasol went on to become an NBA All-Star player. The odds of getting an All-Star player with the the 48th pick was about 1 in a 100. The Houston Rockets then banned their scouts from using “nicknames” for potential draft picks.
Diet books, self-help books, business books, and get rich books pop up every week, and sink just as fast! I have no time or interest!
Bob, but some non-fiction books are worth reading. I try to eliminate the chaff so identify the Good Stuff.